Christopher Cushing

Christopher is the Director of Innovation with the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (theGAHI.org), which is an initiative of the World Humanitarian Summit (2016). Previously, he was the Executive Director / Principal Research Fellow of the Centre for International Cooperation and Security (CICS) in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, UK, where he worked on: the future of the international humanitarian system; catastrophic risk and global systems failure; and crisis – conflict management. He has served as a diplomat / Head (P5) of the International Peace and Security Department at the UN Staff College in Italy. He was also a Canadian diplomat / Senior Policy Advisor for ‘human security’ at the UN Security Council, UN General Assembly, G7-G8, EU, OECD-DAC, etc. He has directed emergency humanitarian field operations in 17 wars and two disasters in +27 countries in Europe, Africa and Asia for MSF, Red Cross, CARE, etc. (e.g., Rwanda Genocide, 1994). He has completed +750 news media interviews and consulted in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, London and New York.